Introduction: Net art is a form of art that relies on the Internet as its primary medium of spreading. Compared to traditional computer art, such art depends and makes use of more on the functions and features of the websites. Another definition can be the form of art that concentrates on the emergence of the Internet and reflects its impact on human’s life.
The creation process was posting all the contents in the author’s computer into a public website which can be accessed by everyone. In other words, they share everything about their cyber life. The work was suspended in 2003, but thanks to Rhizome, at least the archive of this website can be checked now.
The website is quite unconventional. To be exact, it doesn’t have a user-friendly interface but just a bunch of files which are hard to open without any CS knowledge. No background, no instruction, no beautiful images but only many links. When entering the website, the audience needs to repeatedly confirm the popup on the top and they will eventually see a sentence: “You are on my computer”, then they can see the content.
The intention of this project is to test the state of “hypervisibility”, which refers to revealing everything to the public. Here the author expresses his concern for the inevitable and ubiquitous incursion for people’s online privacy, and government’s inspection on people’s daily life through the cyber world.
This art emerged in a day when github and other open source platforms hadn’t emerged, but websites had already become common. This is a push for “open source” as this whole work can be copied by everyone, which is the idea behind github and other platforms. But this work also stresses the importance of reasonable usage of the hypervisibility with good intentions, which means surveillance and commercial purposes are against the spirit of “open source”.
Discussion:
Lots of concepts from this artwork can be potentially applied to my own project. For example, “unusualness” is probably one of the most significant features of this work, as the idea it wants to reveal has never been tried before, thus can have a deep impact on the audience. In my future project, I will also avoid the commonplaces and pick some themes that can resonate with the audience.
This project also embraces one essential concept from CCLab—innovation, which means we don’t need to be restricted to some fixed requirements like user friendliness and interaction, instead, what’s really important is the idea behind the project and all the features employed in the project are just a means.
Link to the project: https://lifesharing.rhizome.org/
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